Hello,
My house is a 1930s ex-Council property.
The water main coming into the house is the original as far as I can tell, and the stop valve is in the corner of the kitchen behind the cabinets, buried in ancient quarry tiles and concrete just above floor level.
There's still a few feet of lead pipe emerging from the old stop valve, but it then converts to 1/2" copper before supplying the kitchen, bathroom etc.
When I bought the property, the stop valve was seized and the handle had been yanked off, but I managed to strip it down and refurb it (middle of the night job as the stop valve in my front garden is easy to access and turns easily... but isolates the whole terrace of houses!). It still works, but it's quite stiff to turn and leaks slightly from the spindle for a few days after it's been operated, in spite of my best efforts to get the gland packing just right.
So now I'm replacing the kitchen again, I thought I would take the opportunity to fit a full-bore lever ball valve just after the existing stop valve, leaving the old valve undisturbed and using the new valve instead. I could then replace those few feet of lead with copper too.
The stop valve has a hex nut as if it's a compression fitting, with a few inches of narrow pipe emerging from it, before a wiped joint onto the fatter lead pipe. So presumably if I carefully loosen this nut, I could then get some kind of reducer so it accepts 15mm copper. Does this sound reasonable?
Thanks.
My house is a 1930s ex-Council property.
The water main coming into the house is the original as far as I can tell, and the stop valve is in the corner of the kitchen behind the cabinets, buried in ancient quarry tiles and concrete just above floor level.
There's still a few feet of lead pipe emerging from the old stop valve, but it then converts to 1/2" copper before supplying the kitchen, bathroom etc.
When I bought the property, the stop valve was seized and the handle had been yanked off, but I managed to strip it down and refurb it (middle of the night job as the stop valve in my front garden is easy to access and turns easily... but isolates the whole terrace of houses!). It still works, but it's quite stiff to turn and leaks slightly from the spindle for a few days after it's been operated, in spite of my best efforts to get the gland packing just right.
So now I'm replacing the kitchen again, I thought I would take the opportunity to fit a full-bore lever ball valve just after the existing stop valve, leaving the old valve undisturbed and using the new valve instead. I could then replace those few feet of lead with copper too.
The stop valve has a hex nut as if it's a compression fitting, with a few inches of narrow pipe emerging from it, before a wiped joint onto the fatter lead pipe. So presumably if I carefully loosen this nut, I could then get some kind of reducer so it accepts 15mm copper. Does this sound reasonable?
Thanks.